Western Australia Surf Forecast by Craig Brokensha (issued Friday 13th April)

Best Days: Saturday, Sunday morning, early Monday, possibly Wednesday morning

Recap

Poor conditions yesterday with small onshore surf, but a new SW groundswell started to fill in through today, with large onshore surf now across the South West. Perth and Mandurah were clean with fun sets before onshores kicked in.

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This weekend and next week (Apr 14- 20)

Today's first large increase in SW groundswell will be followed by a less consistent and slightly better direction long-period groundswell tomorrow morning, generated by a very strong low that formed south-east of Madagascar earlier this week.

We should see strong though inconsistent 10ft sets across exposed breaks in the South West (odd bigger one at deep water reefs), easing through the day and back from 6ft to occasionally 8ft Sunday morning.

Mandurah should see easing sets from 3ft tomorrow, 2-3ft in Perth, smaller Sunday.

Winds tomorrow should improve across the South West with a morning S/SE tending SE breeze (E/SE to the north) ahead of S/SW sea breezes. Sunday will be cleaner with a SE tending E/SE breeze across the South West and E'ly offshores further north.

The easing trend is expected to steady through Monday as a reinforcing SW swell from a less than favourably aligned W/NW fetch currently between us and Heard Island.

Margs should hold around 4-5ft on the sets most of the day, dropping through Tuesday with small 1-2ft waves in Mandurah and tiny waves to the north.

Winds will be great early and offshore from the E/NE, but a trough moving in from the west is due to swing winds more N'th through the morning and then lighter NW into the afternoon.

This trough will unfortunately bring onshore winds into Tuesday as the swell eases, more variable Wednesday morning with our new W/SW swell from a tight mid-latitude low moving through the Indian Ocean.

We're expected to see this low hold a bit more strength longer as it moves towards us through the weekend and early next week, with sets to 4-6ft across Margs and 2ft waves around Perth and Mandurah.

Longer term we're still keeping our eye on the very strong storm forming below South Africa in our far swell window on Sunday.

We'll see a broad and elongated fetch of severe-gale to storm-force W/SW winds projected through our far western swell window, weakening while reaching about the Heard Island region. A secondary weaker intensification pushing closer to us should soften the swell decay a little, but we're due to see a fair bit of swell loss once it arrives on our coast.

The swell's expected to build through Saturday and peak late in the day/overnight, coming in around the 8-10ft range across the South West, but we'll have another look at this on Monday. Have a great weekend!